Your ability to be productive depends on two essential elements that drive planning, prioritizing, and achievement. Categories isn’t one of them.
Do you categorize your to-dos, whether by projects or jobs, calls or follow-ups, or by some other aspect of a task?
Over the years, I’ve seen countless to-do lists from clients who were just beginning to learn Taskology. If they talk about how their to-do lists are categorized in some way, it’s the first thing we dismantle.
Why?
Because it’s an age-old attempt to manage to-dos, but it doesn’t work. It’s inefficient and ineffective, and it actually works against you when trying to get things done.
Categorizing to-dos won’t serve you if your ultimate goal is keep up with tasks, prioritize accurately, plan efficiently, and accomplish tasks more quickly and at the right times.
Here are 6 reasons why you should never categorize your tasks…
#1: Time is missing from the plan.
What you want to do + When you want to do it = a Plan of Action
If you’re missing the second factor, which is all about timing, you lack a true plan of action, which is necessary if you want to get your most important tasks accomplished first.
Without a sense of timing, you only know WHAT you want to do, but not WHEN you’ll take action.
That means you’re not PRIORITIZING what you need to do and when you need to do it, and when THAT happens, you open the door to errors and mistakes in judgement. There’s a greater risk you’re not going to work on the right tasks at the right times.
Plus, later you may discover that tasks you noted and categorized actually slipped through the cracks.
#2: Time in your day is wasted.
When tasks are categorized and put onto many separate lists, it make it harder to determine what to do for the day as well as what’s POSSIBLE to accomplish in the day, and the process for planning and prioritizing will take longer than it should.
When you manage to-dos by category, you end up wasting time reviewing to-do lists again and again—and AGAIN—to figure out what to do next instead of actually using your time to get things done.
Constant reviewing of to-do lists means a constant struggle to plan and prioritize, and the longer that takes, the less time you have for getting tasks accomplished.
#3: The Task-Time Connection™ is missing.
Professionals consistently have too much to do and never enough time. But despite this fact, there IS a way to plan and prioritize tasks effectively so you’re sure to get the RIGHT tasks accomplished—the MOST important ones—on the right days.
In Taskology, the Task-Time Connection™ is essential. It supports a realistic approach for planning, prioritizing and accomplishing tasks according to the time available for this process each day.
If tasks are categorized or listed on separate legal pads, it doesn’t help you match the volume of tasks you need to do TODAY with the time you have available TODAY to work on them. Hence, a missing Task-Time Connection.
The goal is to decrease the number of tasks you target accomplishing each day as you increase the amount of time you have available each day to get those tasks done in order to bring tasks and time back into alignment.
But it’s impossible to make this assessment or the connection when you can’t effectively bridge the gap between tasks categorized and spread out all over the place, and time.
#4: Expectations become unrealistic.
When clients talk about their to-do lists on legal pads or in spiral notebooks, they often say that their daily plan is to get ALL of the tasks accomplished that are written there. It’s completely unrealistic. But they don’t learn this until we talk about this aspect of their task management.
With too many lists, you won’t get a sense of the true volume of tasks on your plate, which may cause you to have unreasonably high expectations of what you can ACTUALLY do in one day. And this can easily do several things.
First, it can easily overwhelm you when you can’t get a firm grasp on all of your tasks and how to prioritize them. Since they are all spread out on different lists, you lack the power to compare them effectively, prioritize accurately and know what to do next.
Secondly, without clarity of tasks and clear priorities, you may think you have more time and bandwidth than you do, which can cause you to over-promise and under-deliver on tasks due to others.
#5: Task DURATION is not defined.
The problem with most to-do lists is that the way tasks are stated, jotted or noted doesn’t help you determine how LONG a task will take. And even when you think categorizing will help here, it won’t. Tasks can still be stated in such a way that it makes it hard for you to take action.
Tasks could be stated too largely or with too many steps hidden within. They could be dependent tasks, where another step really must be taken first before you can do what you wrote down. You might jot down a task that is really more of a project and not a task, which will take longer to do.
Progress results from taking action on SMALL, achievable action steps. One of the 6 essential elements that define a “task” is that it should take anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes to accomplish. If you’re not within that range, you’ll have a hard time planning, prioritizing and getting things done with any speed or simplicity.
Taking action in very small steps makes it easier to accomplish tasks in small stretches of time, which can feel empowering because you know you’re making great progress.
#6: Task VALUE is not defined.
Categorizing tasks by project, job, department, location, or some other category is just an exercise in organizing tasks, but it doesn’t serve you in the planning or prioritizing processes, which means you can’t easily determine if doing a particular task is the best use of your time.
Effective task management isn’t based on how a task is categorized. It’s based on the VALUE of each task and the outcomes you expect from doing it. High value tasks should be planned for action sooner and lower value tasks should be planned for action later. A task’s importance and sense of urgency are also taken into considering in this decision-making process.
Progress is driven faster and easier by having only ONE plan.
In order to effectively accomplish the RIGHT tasks today and every day, you must create ONE central, digital list in your computer to hold ALL of your tasks—not in an app only on your phone.
The list you create is not intended to be one long list of 100 tasks to accomplish this week.
The point is to have all tasks in one SYSTEM (read: INVENTORY), which allows you to do three things very easily and very well…
…reference ONE location for all tasks no matter where they came from
…help you efficiently and effectively compare tasks to plan and prioritize them for action on particular days
…and make it faster and easier for you to get into action to accomplish those tasks.
You’ll likely come up with a variety of tasks AND projects, so if you’re faced with major projects, determine which of one or two of these you’d like to accomplish first. Then drill down to identify the very FIRST action step to get a new project started or the NEXT action step to keep a current project moving forward.
Target a date of action for each and every task no matter what day of the week or in what week or month that will be. Be sure to match up the number of tasks to accomplish on each day with the time you have available in each day, and avoid planning too many tasks per day. In other words, don’t target accomplishing too many tasks for the time you see available on your calendar.
Once all existing tasks are documented—and you continue to document new tasks as you complete previous ones—you’ll gain 100% awareness and total clarity of tasks, which will bring you peace of mind and the power to prioritize.
Plus, you won’t live in fear or worry of missing, losing or forgetting anything, which brings great relief.
When tasks are prioritized realistically, based on their value and planned to align with the amount of time you have available to work on tasks on any given day, you’ll be able to get the RIGHT tasks accomplished on the RIGHT days—regardless of what CATEGORY that task may have belonged to on your former lists.
